READ: How To Create The Organisation

Below is an insight into my thought process regards how to create the organisation we have today. As I’m sure we all know any organisation or team is only as good as the people within it.

This is a snapshot of my proposal to the board and investors on commencing our journey together in China. A plan I wrote 4 years ago that still underpins the way we manage staff to this day.

How do you manage and develop your staff ? Or as an employee, how are you managed ?

Summary of reflections…

I will adopt two types of leadership, giving me the best opportunity for both short and long term success.

Action centred leadership (Adair/situational) will be my daily strategy focusing on the task, the team and the individuals.

Transformational leadership will be my long term strategy so that we set SHL up for the future.

To be effective immediately we have provided clarity around the short, medium and long term goals of the company, and everyone’s role in this, the process in which we are going to achieve it and WHY?

Everyone has been given ownership of the company’s, reputation and are responsible for the behaviours required to uphold it.

A motivational climate has been created based on mastery and performance to achieve our targets and the process of learning and change this will bring.

The staff and stakeholders, are a mixture of strong characters with some old style approaches, some more modern methods, some underperforming with some rising stars who need challenging in the right way.

Each individual will need to be managed differently using various techniques. A key approach is ‘action learning’ (AL) this will allow us to bring people together and engage with each other creating a pragmatic way to deal with issues and creating an environment where the people are self managing. This will coincide with having productive conversations focusing on relationships and change using the EAR strategy, example, affect, request, or performance conversations (brief or detailed) using the AOD strategy, ask, offer, discuss.

Whilst going through this process I will also be using the SARA strategy to deal with the reactions positive and negative that people may have.

For people who are underperforming we will use the CLADAM method to identify the reason or reasons behind this. We will analyse, the individuals capacity to do the role, does the individual require more learning and support? Is the individual bored or burnt out? Assessing their arousal level. Are they distracted? Do they feel alienated or is this because of the way they have been managed?

In the action learning groups each individual will be encouraged to improve their awareness of themselves and the group using the Johari window method, whilst working on an individual task that will improve the company going forward.